1. Technical Field
The present invention generally relates to separating signal sources and, in particular, to online blind separation of multiple sources.
2. Background Description
The separation of independent sources from an array of sensors is a classic but difficult problem in signal processing. Generally, the signal sources as well as their mixture characteristics are unknown. Without knowledge of the signal sources, other than a general assumption that the sources are independent, the signal processing is commonly known in the art as the “blind separation of sources”. The separation is “blind” because nothing is assumed about the independent source signals, nor about the mixing process.
A typical example of the blind separation of source signals is where the source signals are sounds generated by two independent sources, such as two (or more) separate speakers. An equal number of microphones (two in this example) are used to produce mixed signals, each composed as a weighted sum of the source signals. Each of the source signals is delayed and attenuated in some unknown amount during passage from the speaker to a microphone, where it is mixed with the delayed and attenuated components of the other source signals. Multi-path signals, generated by multiple reflections of the source signals, are further mixed with direct source signals. This is generally known as the “cocktail party” problem, since a person generally wishes to listen to a single sound source while filtering out other interfering sources, including multi-path signals.
According to the prior art, a blind source separation technique that allows the separation of an arbitrary number of sources from just two mixtures provided the time-frequency representations of sources do not overlap is described by Jourjine et al., in “Blind Separation of Disjoint Orthogonal Signals: Demixing N Sources from 2 Mixtures”, in Proceedings of the 2000 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, Istanbul, Turkey, June 2000, vol. 5, pp. 2985-88, June 2000. This technique is hereinafter referred to as the “original DUET algorithm”. The key observation in the technique is that, for mixtures of such sources, each time-frequency point depends on at most one source and its associated mixing parameters. In anechoic environments, it is possible to extract the estimates of the mixing parameters from the ratio of the time-frequency representations of the mixtures. These estimates cluster around the true mixing parameters and, identifying the clusters, one can partition the time-frequency representation of the mixtures to provide the time-frequency representations of the original sources.
The original DUET algorithm involved creating a two-dimensional (weighted) histogram of the relative amplitude and delay estimates, finding the peaks in the histogram, and then associating each time-frequency point in the mixture with one peak. The original implementation of the method was offline and passed through the data twice; one time to create the histogram and a second time to demix.
Accordingly, it would be desirable and highly advantageous to have an online method for performing blind source separation of multiple sources. Moreover, it would be further desirable and highly advantageous to have such a method that does not require the creation and updating of a histogram or the locating of peaks in the histogram.